The ProcrasDoCoder Ring is

• a conversation starter for my startup, ProcrasDonate
• gives the team a warm fuzzy feeling while we’re working
• a fun introduction to microcontrollers

The ring, or possibly a pin next to one’s name tag or attached to one’s hat, consists of a bright BlinkM RGB LED with long wires to an arduino unit hidden in one’s pocket or belt loop. The LED lights up colorfully and brilliantly for a few seconds whenever a user of ProcrasDonate donates to a charity, makes a pledge, downloads our software or participates in some user test.

Currently, the code to do all this has been written, but the hardware housing is still in prototype phase. I’ll update the following videos and pictures soon; hopefully with a real use case in the wild.

This video shows a simple demo of the WiShield and BlinkM.

How it works

The ProcrasDoCoderRing is a simple mashup that stands on the shoulders of 4 giants:

Arduino + WiShield + BlinkM + ProcrasDonate web server

In case it’s not clear: much of the WiShield and BlinkM code is copied from relevant examples.

• Arduino – Arduino starter pack from AdaFruit, snap.
• WiShield – from AsyncLabs

  Nice library. Needed to hack a few config lines in the C code for WEP 5 byte passcode (see section below), but otherwise comes with good documentation.

• BlinkM – RGB LED kit from ThingM

  Comes with a nice arduino library that abstracts fading the LED to a specific RGB or HSB.

• ProcrasDonate web server - python Django website

There are two different ways this could work:

1. The arduino registers itself with the ProcrasDonate site, which then pushes information to the arduino using HTTP web requests to the WiShield webpage server.
2. Instead, the arduino regularly pings a small Django app running on ProcrasDonate. The app has a single webpage, which returns the donation counts, etc.

To view the code and more detailed documentation, see the ProcrasDoCoder github repository.

Proudly ProcrasDonating,

Lucy.